Their Eyes Were Watching God - Journal 7

Journal #7: create a pastiche, matching Hurston' style and themes as closely as possible. After you complete your pastiche, write a statement explaining some of the decisions you made in order to match Hurston's writing and objectives.

And thus George started to reflect on Fear. Fear, that ancient companion with deep unnerving eyes who brooded just beyond reach. The primal one who lived on the whisperings of the wind, and in the whisper of a thought.What desire has Fear for physicality, and what rationalizations can hold him back? He waits in his web of shadows that surround the mind. Waits silently and patiently for the creeping of doubt to call him forth. Been waiting there since the first thought, the first action, the first night. He knew he too would soon hear the skittering of his eight legs soon enough. He was cold and alone too. God-forsaken Lennie! He ain't got no need to battle by his lonesome. He offered a last evening of food and of light, but Lennie refused. These folk wuz right about the weather, but they wuz ignorant of his ability. He would weather the storm and put up the light as long as his poor boat could hold together. That was the idea in his head. But the driftwood rising with the monstrous swells told a different story, and so he could tell. And regardless, the coming of morning would reveal the truth, for fog began to gather among the rocks and shoals. Wood that had never yet come with the tide before collected in the water just off shore under circling gulls. Floated, broken and mangled, in the now calm waves. Duty, that buzzing insect, had gone and left an eerie silence on the beach.

I actually had a very hard time writing in the style of Zora Neale Hurston. I found it difficult to write in a tone and voice that was fundamentally different than my own. Other than the use of the same sort of sentence structure, I tried to keep some of the motifs that Hurston uses such as eyes and birds accompanying death. I attempted to keep the same sort of tone of detached emotion and sadness from the original passage but I feel that was met with mixed success.